


above the nine heavens, a phoenix

by Limeritry



Category: Thunderbolt Fantasy 東離劍遊紀 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:34:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21819772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Limeritry/pseuds/Limeritry
Summary: Tie Di Xian survives the Sword Arts Tournament. This poses unexpected awkwardness for everyone involved (except Lin Xueya, the pipe bastard).In which many conversations are held, not much sword-fighting is done, and the past is an unwelcome guest behind every door, metaphorical or otherwise. When all is said and done, can there be a gentler world?
Relationships: Rin Setsu A | Lǐn Xuě Yā/Setsu Mu Sho | Shā Wú Shēng
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	1. Chapter 1

On a snowy night many years ago, a man who was not yet old, but somewhat middle-aged, found a baby on his porch. Now, according to the ancient literary traditions of abandoned infants and adoptive foster parents, one would expect the man to pick up the baby hesitantly, cradle it in the crook of his elbow, look out onto the snowy path to see no footprints, then look down in delight and shock at the baby's soft, snuffling cries. And from there, the road would stretch out, well-trodden, into the distance.

Not so here. The man picked up the baby as one might pick up a sack of turnips, holding it by its swaddling cloth. The baby was silent against his arm, cold and pale, and in the world of snow-bleached monochrome the only colour was the fresh red of the baby's blood, tinting the snow pink, spreading out from the back of its head. The man looked into the distance: no footprints, but on his porch, a bloodied letter. He looked back down at the baby, so pale its skin was tinted green. Putting a finger beneath its nose, the man startled at the minuscule puffs of breath.

And perhaps there was some truth to those tales of love borne in strange meetings, strings of fate knotted loosely but surely, for that night the man traveled all the way down the snowy mountain, and as dawn broke across the horizon spent to the very last coin at the best doctor in the city, and did not sleep nor rest until the baby made its first, soft cry. And for the next month he braided metal with his strong, sword-callused hands, until the fragmented bones of the baby's skull were wrapped securely in a cast of his own making, and the baby looked up at him with red eyes still swollen from tears, and kissed his fingertip when he put it against his mouth. Against the skin of his hand, the man felt steady puffs of breath, warm, soft. Although the baby's face had still not lost its green tint (and it never really would), it curled its small fingers into fists and pressed them up against the metal of its cast, and it was like this that the baby first smiled, giggled, then laughed.

It was only now that the man thought to look at the bloodied letter, grown brittle and slightly yellow in storage. He unfolded it carefully, peering at it in the combined light of the candles and the faint winter sunlight. Tracing the lines of harried ink, he mouthed the first words to himself: This child will become a destroyer of life, a man-eating fiend.

Running the pad of his finger over the paper made rough by dried blood, the man stared down at the letter. It was not until the baby in the cot beside him began to cry that he startled, and remembered that the goat's milk in the bowl had not yet been drunk. The baby reached up for his hand, blinking through the thickening layer of purple hair, face scrunched and tinted red in the effort of its tears.

The man folded the letter and held it over the candle. After a moment's hesitation, he blew out the candle, and put the letter away.

Now, in the manner of sword masters who retire into snowy mountains, the man had not much in the way of companionship. His partner by dawn was the sword, his consort by night the flute, good wine and good food a frequent guest, and if ever he left his wooden house, it was only for some tournament or championship, that upon winning he would quickly return. There was little in the manner of the minuscule, far less in the ways of the delicate, much in the paths of the sharp and dangerous. As the baby grew into a  boy , and went from lying to crawling to walking, the man carved a small sword out of wood, light enough for a child's hand. He hollowed out a reed, and from it made a whistling flute; from his old trunks he took out books of poetry and history, stories popular in his day, painting scrolls and brushes and ink. As he had been taught by many teachers over the course of his moderately long life, the man began to teach the boy.

As the boy grew into a youth, the man guided his hands around wooden blades, then blunted metal, then finally the sharp steel of a sword. The boy's soft hands grew hard calluses like the man's own and the boy's flute-playing turned from simple ditties into whispering, twining melodies that brushed the edges of the bamboo leaves in the shadows of their grove. From the uncertain quavering recitations of poetry developed verses of sharp subtlety, from splashes of ink came sweeping, bold calligraphy. But special talent had the child with the blade, and with a pair of swords he moved with the grace of a phoenix and the bloodlust of a demon.

The man looked at the child, having become himself from middle-aged to middle-old-aged. In another ten years, he realised, this boy would be his equal, if not his better. He flexed his hand, feeling the muscle respond with the tensile strength that it had held almost all his life. How long, he wondered, contemplating the swift and sharp cuts of steel through air, would that last? He thought of the letter that he had not burnt, a few years ago now, and felt the winter's chill cut through him like a sword in the hand of a youth.

And far later, with a sword in his chest under the chilly winter sun, Tie Di Xian saw this scene again in his mind's eye. He looked down at the enemy staring at him through a curtain of purple hair, left eye wide under the mask of wires that he himself had braided, hand wrapped around the hilt of a blade that could have, might have, not have struck. There was a pain in his ankle and a fury in his heart, he wrapped his hand around the sword and pulled. The blade cut into his fingers, slicing like snow on a winter's evening.

His mind turned to the pale bundle on the porch, blood spreading out against the white of the snow. Had he come out an hour later, two hours later, it would have been a corpse, merely one more pathetic, frozen corpse. The pattern of the man's metal mask were half-visible until the cut of his hair. Had he simply not made that cast, the fractures of the child's skull would have killed him in due time anyway. He thought of the letter he had never burnt. He thought of his own hands teaching the hands that would kill him, and wrapped his fingers tighter around the sharp cut of steel.

"I should have never taught you how to wield a sword," he spat at the phoenix rising before him. "I should have waited for you to die!" The demon he had raised stumbled back, hand slipping from the hilt of his own sword. "And if you had refused to die...I should have killed you myself!"

The sword fell with a clatter. Tie Di Xian fell with it: fell backwards into the blood-stained dust of the arena he had championed. And in the silence following the thud of his body against the ground, the only sound was the almost inaudible chuckle of the thief against the Gate of the Black Tortoise, raising his pipe to his lips.

And Sha Wusheng stared, dazed, at his master lying unmoving upon the ground, as the guards surrounded him in a heavy wall of black. Taking his swords back in both hands, he brought them to himself, half-guarded, mostly shocked. Before him, Lin Xueya let the smile unfurl on his lips, and swept out his hand with the grandiose gestures of a ringmaster just now revealing the circus.

"Wusheng," he said, lips quirked in the way that Sha Wusheng had loved. "Perhaps I can explain."

Then, with the slow patience of a hunter cornering a long-awaited prey, he began to speak. Leaning with an aristocratic leisure against the brick walls, he turned his pipe in slow circles in the air, punctuating his sentences with a grey haze. Sha Wusheng suddenly couldn't see his face clearly, and in the hanging opacity of the air, felt the ground lurch, and drop from under his feet.

Through the wafting smoke of the pipe, he saw the red flute that Lin Xueya had given him. The length of an arrow that no longer existed. Its tone was the deep resonance of well-dried wood, lacquered smooth, colouring all its melodies with a earthy wistfulness, a remembrance that sank rather than rose. He had played it, Sha Wusheng thought numbly, and felt the memory that had set the wind under his wings now fracture them into two. Both he, and Lin Xueya, had played that flute. The last time he had heard its rich, tremulous quality was in the exuberant, joyful time before this last match.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the red stains on the sand, pooling from the body of his master. The red pooled in drying puddles, and these puddles seemed to grow larger and larger until they were a sea, a sea of blood choking him with the fury of its onslaught.

A bloodbath. Through the gore and violence Sha Wusheng stormed towards Lin Xueya, blood staining his clothes, his hair, his face. His own blood, but largely the blood of others. And reaching towards that man sheathed in a spotless white, with fingers caught between a clawing desperation and a pleading prayer, the arrow shot through the air, striking his ankle through.

Forced to a stop, he almost stumbled, but the arrow had dug into the dirt, and steadied him in a burst of pain so that he did not immediately fall forward. He tried to straighten, tried to walk, and fell, grovelling, into the dirt. On his stomach, Sha Wusheng stretched his hand out towards the sweep of a snowy-white cloak, and caught the last tremble of the smoke from Lin Xueya's pipe as that man left him behind.

And having nothing left to close around, his hands curled tight around the bloodied, slippery hilt of his treasured, beloved swords.

"I will kill you," he said in a growl that was almost a tremor. Towards the retreating silhouette of a thief and a friend, he vowed: "Wherever you go, I will hunt you down!"

Then, exhausted from the trembling strength of his own hatred, and fainting from the blood he had lost and the injuries he had endured, Sha Wusheng fell into darkness.

In another world, he would have woken alone, among a courtyard full of corpses, and lain among them as almost a corpse himself until a travelling doctor had come, shaking and pale, to search among the dead. He would have spent the rest of his life chasing the fleeting shadow of a white, gauzy cape and hair trailing like a ribbon of frost, caught in the wafting smoke of a elaborate pipe. He would have held up his swords against this man he professed to hate, and at the moment of his vengeance, chosen his own death upon another blade. And on a mountain where the ruins of a powerful sect once lay, would stand his two swords, to greet the dawn and the dusk until they too rusted into so much dust.

But as the phoenix fell into the dirt, his master still bled with the continuous pumping blood of one whose heart still beat. In the quiet of a dead world, two people breathed shallow breaths, both with arrows through their ankles, both with blood on their hands. And when the travelling doctor came, having been paid handsomely by a man dressed in white and blue, holding a beautiful pipe, she found not one living corpse, but two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An idea that has stayed with me for a while. We'll see where this goes.


	2. Chapter 2

In a town that was almost a city, the best doctor there closed her practice without warning for a month. She had left one morning in the pre-dawn darkness, in an unusually large carriage, and returned the same day in the silver-sheathed gray of the late-night moon. Upon return, she retreated into her building, and the "Closed" sign was put up for the following month. Her friends worried that she had gotten caught up in some jianghu feud; her neighbours tactfully did not see the piles of bloodied bandages and basins of pink-stained water; the town gossip was that she had rescued a handsome man from the brink of death, they were falling in love, and in three years they would be married with two children and a dog.

In the private rooms of the doctor's practice lay two beds separated by a embroidered screen. The room was filled with the bitter scent of brewed medicine, and an underlying haze of blood. An old man lay on one bed, bandages wrapped around his chest, is right ankle, and his left hand. On the other bed lay a young man, bandaged just about everywhere.

Sha Wusheng didn't register the third person in the room until a bowl of black, steaming liquid clicked against the desk. Although at first, the doctor had needed to feed him the medicine spoonful by spoonful, he was now well enough to do it himself, and she didn't linger by his bedside. Instead, she went to the her other patient, a shadow barely visible through the tight knit of the screen. Wusheng's grip on the bowl tightened as another tap of porcelain against wood made its way through the coloured silk, then the shuffling of blankets as the other patient sat up. But the hands that had once bloodied the jianghu were now softened in illness and injury. He swallowed the medicine without complaint, and licked his lips to alleviate the bitterness. He ached, but it was no longer the sharp and throbbing pain that had chased him into unconsciousness, and pursued him even then through dreams.

Sha Wusheng glanced again at the silk screen. Yes, he was alive. And the other man, too, was alive.

The old doctor came back around the silk screen, a fresh roll of bandages in her hands. Wusheng, knowing her routine by now, and pulled the blankets to one side, then lifted his arms. She changed his bandages in silence. Wusheng watched the rolls of bloodied white gather in a pile, next to the bowl still holding the dregs of medicine. There was less blood than there had been at the start, and the bandages did not cling, sticky or stiff with gore - they were mostly a faint pink, instead of a deep red or a dark brown. When she unraveled the strip around his ankle, he realised with a start that there was no blood at all. That wound was well on its way to healing. When the doctor re-bandaged him, she left his ankle alone.

She left. He thought that was the end of it, but she came back moments later, and set a pair of slippers by his bedside.

He was well enough, then, to walk. But, from what he felt of his own body, neither far nor fast. Perhaps he wouldn't even make it to the end of this room. And yet, the amount of sleep, or unconsciousness, that he needed had grown shorter and shorter, from the days that he had passed between sleep and waking to the almost-regular cycle of ten-or-so hours per night, and even that was shrinking. He grew restless in his waking hours, he missed the hiss of steel, the whisper of a flute haunted him in the silence of his inaction. Yet if he could barely hold a medicine bowl still, then he couldn't even dream of holding a sword.

"Where is my flute?"

The doctor paused by the open door.

Wusheng remembered, then, that the flute he customarily carried with him had been left in the holding cells of the Sword Arts Tournament. He looked up to tell the doctor not to bother, but she had already left, the door half-ajar behind her. He sat back, and closed his eyes.

In the darkness of his self-inflicted blindness, he heard what he had not heard when she came with the medicine. The shuffle of cotton against the timber floor, the swaying hush of the light, rough fabrics that summertime dresses were so often made of, the clinking of hairpins tapping gently against each other. When the symphony became a texture almost tangible, he opened his eyes.

The doctor set a red flute down against the table.

It was the flute Lin Xueya had conjured for him. Wusheng stared at it, sitting innocuously against the lacquered timber of the table. Yes, it must be, there was no mistake about its simple elegance, although the chip in the lacquer was new. But Lin Xueya had taken it with him. He remembered the white sweep of his cape, beyond his reach, and felt all of his injuries throb at once. 

And yet, it was here.

"Where did you get this?"

The doctor looked at him strangely. "It was in your clothes."

Wusheng looked at the flute without speaking.

After a while, the doctor moved to take the flute back. "Sorry," she said, "my mistake."

He laid his hand over the flute, cupped above it just enough that it didn't touch him.

"There's no mistake." He turned to her, and watched her hand pause in midair. He felt as if a thin, chalky mask was clinging to his face. "It's mine."

The doctor glanced at him. Her hand retreated, and she stepped back.

Wusheng's eyes fixed on the red of the flute, now half-blocked over with the white web of his fingers. He pressed his palm down, until it was a hair's width away from the surface of the flute. He had last heard its song in Lin Xueya's hands. When he had fallen at the Sword Arts Tournament, it had still been in his hands - he remembered, Lin Xueya holding it up, smiling down at him with a quirk to his lips that Wusheng had used to think teasing, or gentle. 

He looked up.

The doctor was already gone, having taken the empty bowl and the pile of soiled bandages with her. The room was silent, with the hollow quiet of a space left to stillness.

He hadn't been able to sense Lin even at the height of health, and now, when a shuffling old lady could catch him by surprise with a bowl of medicine, he knew he had even less of a chance. And yet, he looked around himself, out into the slanting sunlight through the window, at the timber make of the room. He peered into the tight knit of silk on the screen, as if in the overlaying threads he could find some sign, some clue, some hidden message. Nothing. Even the shadow on the other side of the silk screen was silent - asleep, again? He had been asleep often as of late, although he was wounded less deeply than Sha Wusheng. And when he was awake, he never spoke, although Sha Wusheng caught sounds like half-formed words murmured between snores.

He looked at the red flute. Had Lin Xueya been here?

_Was Gale here?_ , he thought.

Sha Wusheng slammed his hand down on the table, sending a thrum of pain through his arms and chest. His hand had landed right beside the flute, and it shivered, then began to roll. Just as it fell off the side of the desk, Wusheng stretched out his hand and caught it in his palm.

Lin Xueya's gift to him. He curled his fingers around it, feeling the delicate, smooth curve of the wood. It was a fine instrument. Stolen, probably, from some wealthy person's vault. His grip tightened. The flute sat unharmed in his palm; his fingers, instead, were the ones that ached. The ache echoed into memory: his ankle throbbed, although he knew it to be the wound healing best and fastest, apart from the surface cuts that were now only faint scars.

Yes. He could walk now, could he not?

Wusheng slipped his feet into the slippers the doctor had left for him. He got up, leaning against the table, and shuffled a few steps. By the time he had made a full circle around the bed, he was sweating. The Screaming Phoenix Executioner, butcher of the jianghu, Sha Wusheng, sweating because he had walked a circle around a bed! If it were not so pathetic, Wusheng would have laughed. As it were, he smiled to himself, and the smile hooked up at the edges as he sank back down into the blankets.

He missed, with a sudden desperation, the certainty of his swords. The reassuring roughness, the quick and clean pattern of them through the air, through bodies, the joy he had felt chasing after the cold edge of steel. At times, he wondered if Lin Xueya had stolen not only the last of his hope, but also his blade, and the weight of his sword in his hand. Master thief indeed - Wusheng himself had not known there was any treasure to steal, and yet stolen it was now, that which was worth more than his life.

Picking up the flute once more, he plucked at its mouth. As a child, music had been trained into him as much as the sword. His gaze slipped to the side, to land on the still shadow of the other patient across the silk screen. It was a stillness that was no longer the relaxed quiet of one asleep, but the wary tension of one awake. He still remembered the trill of this flute, sending him out into the arena, whistling out even as he drew his sword, and his opponent, also, had drawn his sword. He remembered before that, being asked to play, setting his hands with reverence on the wood, as if each breath were sacred, not knowing all the time that he was a jester in a circus.

He was hesitating. When had the Sword Devil, Destroyer of Life Sha Wusheng ever known hesitation? But he forgot. Should he call himself his new name then, the butcher, Screaming Phoenix Killer? He laughed at himself, a cold curve of his mouth.

He put it to his lips. There was a tune that he had heard, walking in the shadows of a marketplace, once, that he had notated but never played. How did it go? How had it gone? It had been a gentle tune, he thought, looking at the shadow across the embroidered screen. He would play it, he decided.

Yes, it had been accompanied by singing. It came back to him now. The rest slipped away, grew distant with a sudden clarity. It had had a lullaby quality to it, demanding a certain whispery quality, somewhat repetitive with the circular trappings of a rondo. Variations on a theme, catching the tunes and ditties of its previous stanzas in startling ways, as the song went from peaceful to bereaved. What had it been about?

It had been a ballad. He could almost hear the singer's voice, full-throated in his ears. Snow, and the moon, a wisp of smoke and a broken heart. Common enough.

And there had been more, but someone had caught sight of him, and the song had stuttered to a halt. His fingers, too, paused upon the flute, unsure where to fall. The echo of the music landed at oblique angles in the room, swallowed by the fabric and reflected by the timber.

Through the stitched silken landscape, Tie Di Xian's voice sounded out. "Enough with the folk ditties," he said, tone grating out in the silence still shadowed with melody. "Something less maudlin."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A belated, introspective continuation.


	3. Chapter 3

Few people would be surprised to learn that Sha Wusheng, when he was young, had not been a rebellious student. This was not because this fact was in itself unsurprising. It had more to do with reality that not many lived to know Sha Wusheng past the edge of his blade, and of the few that did this fact was either the lived experience, or irrelevant. After all, Sha Wusheng only despised Tie Di Xian as much as he did for the weight of respect that had been moulded into him. You cannot hate someone you do not know, and Sha Wusheng had known Tie Di Xian from before the sword had become his life – for a long time, he had chased Tie Di Xian’s footsteps rather than the path of the sword itself, and only later did the blade call to him truly, separate of anything human.

It was some of that reflexive obedience now, that caused him to pull the flute to his lips. After a pause that was consideration rather than hesitation, he began to play a ditty that had been popular in the village at the foot of the mountain, that he had heard week after week for more than ten years and had heard for the last time on the journey he had taken, without stopping, almost fleeing his teacher’s house. It was a bouncy tune, and had bawdy lyrics to go with it, although there was no one to sing them. He was allowed to play without interruption: it was a sort of trance, the way water might freeze for a moment at the peak of a wave before crashing down on the shore.

The silence that followed the end of the tune was even heavier than the one they had started in. Sha Wusheng put the flute down with a light tap on the table, and pulled the blankets over his legs. Were he a humorous man, he would laugh at the comic absurdity of the situation. As it were, he simply lay back, pretending the corpse he had almost become.

He expected Tie Di Xian to do the same. After all, had they not been doing perfectly fine pretending the other didn’t exist beyond the screen? It was not that he despised him, or never wanted to see him again, or anything quite as simply decisive as that. It was just that every time Sha Wusheng opened his mouth, the tangle of what had happened and the bloodstained confusion of it clogged his words. There seemed nothing quite suitable that would break through the glassy mess of what lay between them.

“Why were you there at all?” Tie Di Xian’s voice broke through the painted screen. Were Sha Wusheng not someone who had spent half his life fending for it, he would have jumped. As it were, with instincts already dulled from inactivity and the faint numbing effects of the medicine, he blinked. At the Sword Arts Tournament?

Because Gale had suggested it.

Wusheng’s lips curled into a mocking smile. “To establish my honour,” he said. “To leave Sha Wusheng behind, and become only the Screaming Phoenix Killer.”

Tie Di Xian scoffed. “The Screaming Phoenix Killer has in one tournament acquired more blood to his name than Sha Wusheng has across his entire career. Before you were the mercenary, cold enough to kill at a price, now you are the butcher, willing to kill even without a price. A fine honour you’ve established!”

“It seems I’m quite hated,” Sha Wusheng murmured. The other side broke off into a sudden silence.

Finally, after a long silence, Tie Di Xian laughed. “What did you expect of Sha Wusheng, the man-eating ogre? What did you expect of the Screaming Phoenix Killer, butcher and executioner? The world knows of your disgrace – “

“I did not,” Sha Wusheng cut him off. He gripped hard on the thick cover of his blankets. The flush of anger passed over him. “I was tricked. As you were.”

“Ha! Lin Xueya that wretch.” The hacking cough that followed the laughter faded into a rattle. “I must admit, I didn’t expect it. I had thought us to be friends, or at least partnered to the same outcome – I to my victory and him to his entertainment. Did you think him a friend as well?”

Sha Wusheng bent his head forward. “Yes,” he said, softly and very calm. “My life had changed, everything, because of this man.”

A pause.

“I had thought myself senile to not at least suspect his tricks.” Tie Di Xian’s voice was almost pitying. “But at least I wasn’t as stupid as you.”

“Never again.” Wusheng’s voice hardened. “I will chase him to the ends of the earth. No matter where he is, I will definitely kill him.”

The conversation, strangely peaceful as it was, ended on that note. The sudden interlude of speech had tired out Sha Wusheng’s throat. He washed down some water, then lay back down into his blankets. The stifle of stillness itched at him, the soft fabrics a cage around him, and like a beast tied in chains and past the point of struggle, he fell into sleep.

Sha Wusheng recovered somewhat quicker than Tie Di Xian. He was after all, younger, not as age-torn nor weary. Another month passed in silence, broken by medicines and massages, sheets less and less bloodstained with each passing day, until finally, the doctor gave him leave of not just the room, and the corridor, but the garden and even the outside world.

The first thing Wusheng did with his newfound freedom was check his coin. There wasn’t much left – the most of his money he had entrusted to Gale. Barely enough for a night at an inn, let alone months under someone else’s roof. He was not a person comfortable with leaving himself in debt.

Walking into the garden, he seated himself in the shade of a peach tree, blossoming bolding in the full flush of spring. The brief trip from his room left him short of breath, his joints aching with disuse. No, there would be no retaking of his assassin’s job, not like this. Before Lin Xueya was dead, he had no wish to be giving out his own life, especially to some weakling unworthy of it.

And besides, he had never finished his match with Tie Di Xian. The clash of their swords and the arrow that had split the purity of their blades haunted his sleep. He would never be satisfied if he did not separate out a victory, and so he would wait. It was not in his habit to leave things unfinished, not riddles unsolved, not battles unwon.

But since he was here, he could not in good taste leave the doctor unpaid. His usual talents were unfortunately not available. Could he work, then, as a musician? He had some faith in his flute, and this was a town large enough for an entertainment house. It would be good to have money once he was back on the road. He wouldn’t have time for jobs on the side. Not when Lin Xueya was still out there, tempting him like a ghost.

Having decided, and recovered some of his breath, he got up. He had brought his swords with him, but found them heavy, too heavy to carry with the ease of before. He set them down regretfully, and straightened, lighter, emptier, stretching his body towards the sky and revelling in the possibility of its movement. It was a sunny day, although quite cold, one where the sunlight was high and glared with such aplomb on the earth that none of its heat quite made it through.

There were mushrooms strewn in the grass. They were not the type that were cultivated, but rather the wild species that appeared after rainfall, and disappeared in one or two days. It had rained last night, and he had fallen asleep half-aware of the rattling breathing of the man almost beside him were it not for a silk screen, and the droplets tapping like a musician’s hands upon the roof tiles. He had fallen asleep, but the rain had followed him into fitful dreams, and when he had woken the rain had stopped and the silence on the other side told him the other man had woken as well.

It was the sort of garden that belonged clearly to a doctor. Apart from the singular peach tree, and a small clump of bamboo, the rest was divided into various herbs, non-flowering grasses, small buds. The scent was stronger than the appearance, light without the heavier bitterness of medicine, still bitter of course, but refreshing rather than off-putting. Movement caught his eye, he turned.

A pair of butterflies dipped in and out of sight, before landing with the courage of ignorance upon the hilts of his swords. Sha Wusheng walked towards them. It wasn’t until his shadow fell on them that they startled, and with a flutter of their patterned wings, disappeared into the a clutch of peach blossoms. Wusheng picked up his swords, cradling them like children. They were heavy.

Drawing one out with a familiar slide, he saw his face suddenly, starkly reflected in the blade’s smooth flatness. He blinked. The left side of his temple, the one he had always covered with his hair and his mask, flashed back at him. With one hand, he reached to touch the scar running across it, where his skull had split as a baby. It was not as grisly as he had imagined.

Strange. He had always imagined it as a scar larger than the rest, but it was smaller and fainter than almost all the scars he had earnt in his later years. It had been months since he had worn his mask. He had almost gotten used to the weightlessness, the lack of protection around his face. It had been months, and the habit of twenty and more years had almost lifted from him.

A sudden unease swept him up. He pushed the sword back into his scabbard. Idiocy. Who used a sword as a mirror, like some child before a vanity exploring their own features for the first time? A sword was a sword, it purpose was in its sharpness, not its reflection. Had he really wasted away so much that even this fundamental fact, the very purpose of a sword, was lost on him?

The peace that had crept on him scattered. Picking up his swords once more in both arms, he left the garden quickly.

On his way back, he rummaged through his old clothes. As his fingers brushed over the cold twisted steel pattern of his old mask, his old cast, something settled in his chest. That night, he put the mask on his bedside like a seal or a charm, and slept with no dreams.

The following morning, after the routine of medicines and the changing of bandages, Sha Wusheng got up and left through the front door. The mask he left at his bedside, the swords slanted in the corner of the room. Tie Di Xian had not yet been awake when he left the room, and he stole out quietly.

The doctor looked up as he passed through her house. Her eyes scanned him up and down, and finally she said, “I would recommend you stay for at least a few more weeks.”

“My business here is yet unfinished.” Sha Wusheng pulled his hair into a high ponytail, and after some consideration, clipped a few of his customary ornaments into his hair. It would be unwanted and unnecessary trouble to be recognized. He had no wish to waste his sword. But neither could an entertainer afford to look poor. “I will be back in the evening.”

The doctor shrugged, and continued spooning her breakfast.

The simple robe and lack of armour left him feeling curiously light as he walked through the streets. The entertainment house was easy enough to find, being in the corner of the town, a lusty jewel along the slums that filled the rest of the street. A few women stretched out their hands to him from the doorway, smiles red and flirtatious under a heavy coat of makeup.

“Looking for some fun?” one called to him.

Wusheng held up his flute. “Work,” he answered shortly.

The smiles disappeared, as did the flirtation. “Well,” another said after a pause, “if that’s the case, I’ll get you the Madam.”

Wusheng narrowed his eyes, following her in through the back. Brothels were teahouses by day, and by the looks of it, this one managed that dual identity with considerable talent. Only a few drunkards were stumbling, half-dressed, from the inner rooms, and they departed through the back door. The glimpse he got of the main room showed that the company that visited this time of morning was more of the tea-drinking, politics-discussing scholars than the bawdy princes or rich lords.

Lifting a curtain, the woman slid a hand onto her hip. “You first,” she said, looking somehow down at him even from a head shorter.


End file.
